According to the Direct Marketing Association, around $100 billion was spent on US business-to-business direct marketing at the beginning of the new millennium. Of this total, telemarketing accounts for about 40%, and direct mail expenditures total about 16%. Business marketers typically target prospects within a business based on their ability to recommend, influence or approve a purchase. Commonly, the marketer obtains, for example, a list of the name, title, postal address, and/or telephone numbers of these prospective buyers so that direct marketing programs can be initiated.
Further elaborating on this example, typically, a prospect must have the ability, willingness, and readiness to buy before a direct sate can be consummated. One method is to identify individuals with certain titles (e.g. CEO, VP Marketing) that are likely to correlate with purchasing authority. Vendors, such as Dun & Bradstreet, Murray 011, NJ and InfoUSA, Omaha, Nebr., gather business data through a variety of means. For example, the sources for InfoBase Business List (Acxiom Corporation, Little Rock, Ark. www.acxiom.com) include:                Annual reports, 10Ks, and other SEC information. These sources provide accurate, in-depth information about publicly traded companies including the name of executives and directors, employment figures, sales volume, and more.        Federal, state and municipal government filings. These sources provide current directories, reports, and Chamber of Commerce information.        Business magazines, newsletters and newspapers. These sources provide news about business merger, acquisitions, executive changes and financial results.        Outbound telemarketing. These sources provide information about small businesses and their owners obtained from firms who frequently market to these businesses.        Professional directories. These sources provide invaluable information about professionals, their clinics and partnerships, and their specialties.        
Leveraging these sources, the InfoBase business list provides over 14 million business names and addresses representing over 12.9 million separate businesses.
There are several limitations in utilizing these sources for compiling, for instance, a list of senior managers. The limitations include:                Recency. American society has been characterized by shorter tenures of employment and greater job mobility. But many of the sources used to compile lists of senior managers are updated infrequently. In some instances, data is refreshed only once every 1–2 years. This means that changes in senior management, such as new hires and terminations, go unreported for a significant time.        Cost. Because it is so labor intensive, it is often prohibitively expensive to conduct telephone or face-to-face interviews, or verify contact information ‘on demand’.        Comprehensiveness. Often, only a small number of contacts are gathered at each business. For example, Acxiom's list contains an average of 1.17 contacts per company (14 million contact names at 12 million US businesses). What's more, contact data for non-US companies is even scarcer.        
Accordingly, there is a need to develop a more useful and efficient approach to compile business data that overcomes the limitations in the prior art solutions.